Fix

There is no caring less
for you. I fix on music in the weeds,
count cricket beats to tell the temp, count
my breaths from here to Zen.
September does its best.
The Alaskan pipeline lacks integrity,
mineral fibers are making people dizzy,
we're waiting for a major quake. Ultra-
violet intensity is gaining,
the ozone's full of holes and

I can find no shade.
There is no caring less.
Without the moon the earth
would whirl us three times faster, gale-force
winds would push us down. Say
earth lost mass, a neighbor
star exploded—it's if

and and and
but. The cosmos owns our luck.
Say under right and rare conditions,
space and time could oscillate.
I know what conditions
those would be for me.
I'd like to keep my distance,
my others, keep my rights
reserved.
Yet look at you, intreasured,

where resolutions end.
No matter how we breathe
or count our breaths,
there is no caring less
for you for me. I have to stop myself

from writing "sovereign," praising
with the glory words I know.
Glaciologists say changes
in the mantle, the planet's vast
cold sheets could melt. Catastrophe
is everywhere, my presence
here is extra—yet—
there is no caring less.

Alice Fulton
Felt

IUIB Welcomes Drusilla

So this was the perfect birthday for so many reasons, at least two of which begin with the letter C. Upon arriving back at Chez Pooh Corner, a small, black cat waited on the front steps looking rather put-out by the delay in our return. This cat so resembled my own beloved Gladys that I had to run home and check to be sure a get-away had not occured.

She is a licorice gumdrop and adored. At the moment, she is a foster kitty and may be seeking out a home. If you or anyone you know is in need of (another) cat, contact Emu Headquarters.

Shrek the Third was good, not One or Two good, but worth-it. Hello Kitty Pez dispensers are a cure for depression. As are shiny silver and black I-Pods sportscar-sleek. Reading short stories by the river. Eating breakfast with a newly-returned Someone. Then sushi and olives and cherries and hot tea and kitty and me and thee....

Every birthday should be so gorgeous.

Some Birds

though flightless, will fly all night just to be home for your birthday. No bird could mean more, in spite of his breezy self.

594 days ago, you were favorited. 594 years from now will bring more of the same. Someone is waiting by the door for you. Maybe one someone, maybe two, some green, some blue. The someone who puts the mustard away weirdly hardly at all misses you.

Larry Levis AND David St. John

David St. John spoke about Larry Levis last night in the Elliston Room. Hearing the old stories and the trajectory of life, poems, career reminded me that a thing like Larry can happen in the world and sadly too, can stop. It made me want to go home and let everything I love know so. I also felt private and went late-night grocery shopping just to be alone and not talk to anyone. Those two feelings, all at once, are a Larry Levis poem. After I got home the sky just opened up and there was thunder and lightening and a voice on the phone making sure that I noticed. All in all, a bittersweet Tuesday.

DSJ ended with a quote from a note by an old friend of Larry's that went something like: He drops by sometimes. He likes being dead, it suits him. It just doesn't suit us.
If you knew Larry--even a little--you felt that one in your gut.

I'm posting one poem here, though you should read all of them, anywhere you can find them.

In a Country

My love and I are inventing a country, which we
can already see taking shape, as if wheels were
passing through yellow mud. But there is a prob-
lem: if we put a river in the country, it will thaw
and begin flooding. If we put the river on the bor-
der, there will be trouble. If we forget about the
river, there will be no way out. There is already a
sky over that country, waiting for clouds or smoke.
Birds have flown into it, too. Each evening more
trees fill with their eyes, and what they see we can
never erase.

One day it was snowing heavily, and again we were
lying in bed, watching our country: we could
make out the wide river for the first time, blue and
moving. We seemed to be getting closer; we saw
our wheel tracks leading into it and curving out
of sight behind us. It looked like the land we had
left, some smoke in the distance, but I wasn't sure.
There were birds calling. The creaking of our
wheels. And as we entered that country, it felt as if
someone was touching our bare shoulders, lightly,
for the last time.

Larry Levis

Never Again Will Birdsong Be the Same

http://hotemuluv.com

Extra:Rochester holds rare birds hostage. It's an outrage.

If I could shuffle
the alphabet, I'd stick I
right next to E-mu.

Even Better Live

David St. John is in town!

Happy Birthday T! *Mandarin Oranges Shaped Like Smiles*

A poem you might recall.
http://www.versedaily.org/2007/forsixseconds.shtml

Vintage Verse-Lust (an old beloved scrap of a poem)

I made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Lucille Clifton

Human Beauty
by Albert Goldbarth
If you write a poem about love . . .
the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death . . .

the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.

Copyright © 2007 by Albert Goldbarth Reprinted from The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems

I Love You Frank O' Hara

And in your honor I wrote a poem that dear, hot, sharp Jillian W. has directed me to read on Verse Daily. This makes me very happy: being Versed Daily. Verse This, Readers.

In other news: a big fat congratulations to Eliot Khalil Wilson for his Bush Foundation award. Eliot's poems make me proud to write poetry.

Saintly Days Ahead--Welcome!

TURQUOISE

Imagine the sky compressed within
The clenched earth

The pressure composed by deep fire
At the core of

The ether of transcendence surrounding
Us until the knuckles & nuggets

Spit high into the air
A smoldering blessing

Of the involuted skies as if even
The light above the sea had folded

Back onto itself so many times
This petrified mirror of stone we carry

Becomes a bible blue
Darkening from beauty into night
David St.John

Fracture

Back from Kenyon, a bit worse for the wear and trying to type with a splinted-up right hand. Some journeys are just as well left unmade.

Carrying On: For Whatever a Sun Will Always Sing is You

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

ee cummings

Greetings from Kenyon

Pretty little town it is.

A large Australian ratite bird it is not.

Soon I drive south.

Oh Omaha

Ready or not Omaha Nebraska, Coz here we com
Somebody pinch me Coz I can't believe I'm here This is somethin that I've dreamed of all my life Dreamed of all my life
And I can't believe That it all comes down to this,
And this is something that I've waited for all my life
---Bowling for Soup

The Snapdragons Love You. (Of course they do.)
Kisses Back Atcha.

Listen Up, Lemondrops

Just re/turned/covered from my Florida trip. The trip was so nice, but my idea of departure times was all but genetic. (My family manages to leave at 3 am, somehow. Fun, when you're the airport driver.) This time I dragged lovely Kathrine across (literally) the state of Florida and my sister and her terrific boyfriend out of bed at yes Kids, four a.m. But it was a wonderful time, nonetheless. Hung out with Noal and Kathrine. Had one of Chase's infamous (& my first!) Lemon Drop Martini. (You don't come back from that kind of knowledge.) Read with Kathrine. My feet touched ocean. I beachcombed. Saw a floating random Gypsy on the beach in Tampa. Watched the sun set. Ate grouper. Met (& adored!) Zoe the bunny-furred cat. Missed Gladys, the Dweebs and my beautiful neighborhood, neighbor. I want to live by the sea. Hold the hurricanes, please.

I Heart Pelican, I Heart Ibis

I miss emu.

Little Pitchers

Props to JB for the info on In the Realms of the Unreal and the Ashbery connection.

As for yesterday: I've written you a note under the puddles. The posies still recall your voice on the phone. Your erased call-log is the only amnesia. Be the careful dweller amongst tyrants and spies. Her name sounds like a sigh in the pantry and ends with a threat. What music she carries, she carries away. Her dance step is the break and enter. I leave you a poppy, a tulip, alone.

In honor of Lesley & Hannah's Youtube treatment of my girls and their lives after death.

"Spring at Wu-Ling" by Li Ch'ing-chao (1084?–1151)translated by Eugene Eoyang
The wind subsides—a fragranceof petals freshly fallen;it's late in the day—I'm too tired to comb my hair.Things remain but he is goneand with him everything.On the verge of words: tears flow.
I hear at Twin Creek spring it's still lovely;how I long to float there on a small boat— But I fear at Twin Creek my frail grasshopper boatcould not carry this load of grief.



Mary Cornish does a great job of discussing this poem on today's Poetry Daily. I just love its spareness, the frail grasshopper boat of it.

Today's weather is wet and grey. I welcome the sunlight and palm trees of Tampa & Boca Raton. I welcome the awayness.

It is Spring, Damn It!

In the history of The Mood Swing, there have been a number of ways to ride it. Often, when amongst the literati, we "talk it out" When I say Mood Swing, I mean a blue tire hung off a childhood tree, the apples bright and too high to reach, the day ever the last of summer. (I mean all summers, dream and season.) I mean I can be a sad ocelot. Very gloomy. No fun ever. You read me, BigBear? I am and am not talking to you. Miss KittyKat knows what I mean when your SAD becomes all kinds of shapeless drab sweater sad. Not edgy Ophelia mad, just I'm too bored to breathe--or want to. Plus the sky's a stupid color again, like dirty water and it's cold as the draft of your ex-wife's soul or choose your metaphor. (Simile don't rhyme slantly with soul.)

In light of this, if this were David Letterman, there would already be a top ten list for why the Sir PrettyBird is the best handler of the zoo of my surreal loneliness where even the monkeys slouch some and frown. Even the kangaroos don't hop to that tune. Observe last summer. Sad girl rounding the corner to breakfast with SPB and! who is waiting with an orange plastic machine gun of cold water? That's right. Which girl was drenched and giggling far away from even the memory of the melancholy? But today, it's 3o degrees under the dirtywaterheavens we keep here just outside of Java Joes and when the kind sir picks me up in the car and I am bundled up in the winter clothes I thought I'd put away, he says "it's Spring damn it! and he takes the lid off his spacebubble car and puts the seats on simmer and we drive, me in my electric blue scarf and his borrowed slick shades and he all sunglassed and looking like mid-July on Sunset and the cars around us hope for a sip of the gush of music spilling from our very own sky and we let them taste a tiny bit and keep driving by.

With Apologies to the Emuist

Who regularly doses me with sci-fi and like my friend, Maggie once adviced me "when a beautiful man serves you, you should never turn the spoon away, " so I read and I admire...
And yet, this has been a few weeks of revelling in the odd little finds of books and pamphlets and chapbooks that I can finally w/o guilt, DEVOUR.

Currently, Jillian Weise is blowing me away (BUYBUYBUYthisbook!) expect postings later. I am also reading Black Box by Erin Belieu and this little jewel, from which I offer you a taste:

Upon Discussing Whether We Should Condescend to Science-Fiction Writers

Let's pretend we really believe fanged anorexic midget space aliens want to rape our pets and turn the President of the United States into soggy cotton candy....

from Steve Fellner's Blind Date with Cavafy

Girl Baby's First Seder

Tuesday night it was. Loveliness. Next week I see Kathrine (& read w/Kathrine too!) After much too long I see my little sister, my soon-to-be bro-in-law (I already dig him) & my neice, the inimitable Ms. Zoe. After that, at the airport, the prettiest emuist will be. I feel like it's my birthday and I get the doll cake with the big frosting dress! (The brunette one, of course.) This is the spring I've been waiting for.

My goals include the following: start waking up before noon, limit the TV watching to six hours a day, lose 90 pounds, don't let anyone other than my dog ever see me in this horrible ass "swimming outfit" I've just concoted, which includes a bathing suit that doesn't fit, underneath some clingy blue shorts and an old men's white t-shirt, and, lastly: learn how to love again.
***
Listen to me, I'm blaming you from five-hundred miles away.
Asher Paine, from Ninety-Six Bottlecaps on the Veranda

Reader,
I almost like you in this lighting. I almost forgive you for whining at the hard parts in books. I almost want to hold you sometimes or hold you over a fire. I have unfocused rage. I take it out on beanbags. I hunt things. I am a good boy scout some days. Then I torch the city just to light my cigarette. I can read by the light of that shit.
Just when it starts speaking in cinders. Just when everyone’s ready for the end. I see something familiar in the shapes of the flames. That’s when I start weeping like a motherfucker. Just when you left it all for dead, think again. That, Reader, is when I’m going back in for what I love.
Asher Paine, from Ninety-Six Bottlecaps on the Veranda

Arachne

The belled air ringing. Slowly she wakes through a craving
to weave, through a sunlit dream of Athena singing her back into sleep,
she is alive no she is dead and it is Athena
standing watch over the ghost of her human form,
Athena who undid the plaited rope until it was
only a single strand and then she floated into
another way of moving so soft that she felt
her entire body whirled through a maze of light
and then her body disappeared and for a moment
she drowsed inside her shadow and then it was Athena
who told her what she had become or else
it was the mouth of an Argive woman speaking
after she had devoured her infant or perhaps
it was the eyes of Teiresias watching two snakes
coupling in the grass or it might have been
the slow hand of Zeus traveling a woman's body and
when she finally emerged from the long tunnel of silk
she saw that her own body hung exposed
in a shimmering web she was dead no she was alive
her skin reeling bright silver filaments helplessly
into the dusk. There was nothing else to feel
but a terrible hunger to spin.
Rita Signorelli-Pappas New Orleans Review

V E G A S This, Baby

Most-missed Mister, giver of beautiful brocade shirt--such fuchsia and coral gardens. Such a blazing sky, so much sorry rain. It's late and the phone has been happy today. You are lighting up the Vegas strip, my sweet and I am glad to know you. Too much gets taken away. Thank you for the examhoorayrolextwinwristers and every present you brought me, which pales all to the comeback of you.

Armed with Such Singings

MY ARMS

My arms are mostly cosmetic. If I say this
to a stranger, often he will wince,
he’ll look like he wants to hide
inside his eyes, be made to vanish
from that day. I shouldn’t say it,
shouldn’t laugh, should be tired twenty-one
years into the telling of what
is a poor joke, made of pain,
nerves snuffed like wicks. Back
then, I was a boy. No secret
that I fell through that
summer like a star. And here I am
anticipating spring, my ears
slave to birdsong after a long
winter. I look to the clouds
and think how once I prayed
my arms might serve me
again, roll toothpaste from the tube,
dump rice into boiling water,
swat dead the mosquito
drilling its derrick of a face
through my skin. That sum of symmetry,
left and right, one and one,it’s not a math I know
much of. Not anymore
though there are days I want
to lament the broken
glass or put my fist
through the cheap door
or throttle the blue sky’s long, silent
throat. There are nights
full of ache, full of
nothing nimble. No music
but smashed guitars
would suffice. How many clasps did I try
with my teeth and at this
fail until she put
her hands to my raw
work? Untrue to say I lost count
of what I never wanted
to keep. Untrue to say that when we loved
and for me she put
my hands to her hips
to hold her body there above mine
that I loved such need,
that I did not hate us both.

---Paul Guest (author of The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, Notes for My Body Double, Exit Interview and soon, One More Theory About Happiness. (His poetry is mine.)

Used Bookstore Love

The mailman sighs when you open the front door in a silk kimono. I sigh when you open any door. I swear this before our sharp-beaked lovebirds just now awakening in their golden cage, exchanging necklaces crafted from the legs of a spider.
Peter Johnson

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Reader Give Me Some Pause
I mean I like it: like how when a beautiful man dates an ugly woman and it gives me pause, you know you think it, too, Reader. It's not the easy math like when a beautiful girl dates an ugly man. The slot machines make such a racket. Or Daddy Issues or Garden Variety Catastrophe. But when a beautiful man dates an ugly chick the brain see-saws a little. I like that hiccup in the think-factory. When the gears catch & click and slowly grind again.
***
Like when Bernadette wears that green eyeshadow that flashes in the stop light I can't decide whether it's turning me on or grossing me out. Bernadette talking & talking & me thinking lizardine belly or hot jade hooker eyes. The stereo full-blast on the tree touching street. Arouse the birds off their perches.
***
Today I heard Nothing whistling through the trees. Some fake volcanos ignite. Keep your flouncy nacreous clouds for doilies, Aphrodite. Yesterday's sky had a hard-on. Wax & wane. What I love cannot be effaced.
---Asher Paine, excerpts from Ninety-Six Bottlecaps on the Veranda

There or at Sinai?

A million years ago, I found a poem called Love, a Dark, Untitled Comedy in, I think? Hayden's Ferry Review? No matter, the point is, I memorized it within a couple of days and accosted the author when she visited the BWR booth at AWP.
Today, as I am ready to donate old mags somewhere (the apartment brimmeth) I reach for Southern Poetry Review, open to a random page and stop:

Half-light
after Andre Breton

the twilight is a red snapper
& in the tangerine grove
suns hang burning from the trees

because I am waiting for you

& if you come walk with me
no matter where
miracles will hurry to meet us

A chameleon will press his cool belly to my heart
turn first a sad tan
then a jade jealous green---

because he loves you too

I don't know why
but the earth is deeper than water
is a turtle finally shaking off its shell

I saw you evolve
from the salt sludge of the ocean
I was there

Wait, no, I wasn't

I was waiting here even then
& I was sad
the sky between leaves hard as a horseshoe crab

I shut my eyes--
I was where you see me

Where are you?

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Sweet Basil

The new little plants are coming up in the big winter pot. It's always so exciting to see that scattering of green on the bare soil. I had hoped they'd be up in time for Sir Emu's return.

WE LIVED TOGETHER

We moved stones
to the edges of our field,

sleeping outdoors in summer.

The sky dense with stars,
the horizon dark

with other voices singing.

We lived together a long time,
sometimes weeping as we ate,

silent as we dug the garden.

I have known finding
and losing her,

both were terrible.

We shared black sand,
many fallen roses,

losing our portion of sleep.

David Greenslade

Luminous Everything

I just watched Everything is Illuminated and wonder why I don't hear more about it--I thought it strange and lovely. Now that I have my life back, it's funny that I am still reading and viewing the same stuff. Currently, and kind of uncharacteristically, in some ways, I am reading Suite Francaise by Irene Nemerovsky. "We dressed the children by torchlight" is an example of eerie-pretty-starkness. It's the kind of book I think I should read (what brussel sprouts were to us when we were little) but then resist for that very reason. But I was coerced into it by friends and am now really grateful. Not necessarily feeling the same way about the new Assia Weevil biography... We shall see.

Seeing Each other

Just Walking Around

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is no name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.
John Ashbery

Question for AWP Attendees

This is a long shot but my fiction group was curious about the magazine that accepts work from writing groups instead of individual writers. Anyone else pick up that little postcard and NOT lose it?

In other this-evening news as it's Spring Break here and I am soloing it not just on account of certain migrating birds but the others of my posse who are either away or in other ways away; I made dinner and because I am always envious of Anthony Robinson's meals, I'll call him out and say I made this fabulous tuna with a vegetarian casserole. It was not at all the feasts of the gourmet poet I see pictured on www.luckyerror.blogspot.com but it was kind of pretty. Really.

Words on Walls is up and if not yet running, then limping along prettily. Check out the incredible stuff there and watch as it expands before your very eyes over the next couple of weeks.

Seven Days W/O Emu Makes One Weak

With apologies to Taco Time Evanston, Wyoming circa summer 1979. At Pooh Corner more basil was planted and the old basil never died, so that when me & my emu pesto it up we hope never to know which batch was which--such loss issues have we, such nostalgias. Lots of things like that basil--celebration material and a few to grieve. One day soon, a plane corrects itself. One day soon, a blissed-out someone waits in terminal three.

Hardly Skylarkin'

No Road
Since we agreed to let the road between us
Fall to disuse,
And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us,
And turned all time's eroding agents loose,
Silence, and space, and strangers - our neglect
Has not had much effect.
Leaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown;
No other change.
So clear it stands, so little overgrown,
Walking that way tonight would not seem strange,
And still would be allowed. A little longer,
And time would be the stronger,
Drafting a world where no such road will run
From you to me;
To watch that world come up like a cold sun,
Rewarding others, is my liberty.
Not to prevent it is my will's fulfillment.
Willing it, my ailment.
-- Philip Larkin

Pretending it's Early Morning

at twilight, I head out to a neighborhood that looks like the inside of a body with all that wild pink light and a moon that looks clipped straight off a hand made of light. I felt like I was made of light--post Yeats, post so much talk of elegies and witness and survival. I pretended it was dawn, the day turned around to meet a day, say in....Thailand where a Sir-tain someone was off to a world all fishly dark and seaweed. My neighborhood is stunning with old houses that wear that dusk (dawn) so well. Big, old wealthy houses with a huge, huge bouquet left out by the trash, still cellophaned-up, a big glass vase and two ribbons keeping it all mummified. The flowers--roses and nasturtium and so many more--were not dead, hadn't even been brought in or adored yet. So they came home with me and I pretended they were sent for the end of exams but by some anonymous rich person who didn't know me and so didn't hurt my feelings by not knowing that I don't like flowers sent to me, I resent the expense. I prefer my own random, goofy arrangements or rescuing lost flowers from outside floral shops (they throw out the shabby roses about once a week here at my neighborhood florist...) I prefer the memory of one old boyfriend calling in a flower order from New York to Salt Lake and the florist calling me to say I had a few dollars to spend on a "Friday bouquet."

Licking Every Square Inch of Lorca's Face

Wish

Just your hot heart,

nothing more.

My Paradise, a field,

no nightingales,

no strings,

a river, discrete,

and a little fountain.

Without the spurs,

of the wind, in the branches,

without the star,

that wants to be leaf.

An enormous light

that will be

the glow

of the Other,

in a field of broken gazes.

A still calm

where our kisses,

sonorous circles

of echoes,

will open, far-off.

And your hot heart,

nothing more.

Three Cheers & Sun as Frisbee

Finished the long project of exams--I feel as free as that sun I frisbee backwards to Thailand for a boy under that embroidered sky. The first to congratulate me indeed.

Sweet Chicky took me out for a wonderful dinner at (our joint) Red Pepper(perfectly basil-infused and enough red chilis to make it spicy).
I also made off with a gorgeous coppery bird pendant, some sparkley water and Mosquito--POETRY I don't HAVE to read but can't wait to devour.

I am off to this huge cemetery to gather notes for a new poem. Today is so sunny and I am homemade oatmealed and all kinds of blissed-out. Soon I read in Florida. Soon I visit New York. Even sooner--but not soon enough--me and Sir Emu will be celebrating! I am so in need of some celebrating. The House on Pooh Corner's all echoey and the key to the door does not start the usual party... Come home already.

Off to the graveyard, with stationary and confetti.

One Night from Bangkok

Some voices are whole worlds. That's all.

Today at Sippy Cups abrim with that neighborhood-cafe-on a-so-appreciated-gift of-a-glittery-sunned-day-feeling. Everyone was out. The lime iced tea a kind of nectar--otherworldly good.

A general sense of well-being and a bed with clean sheets. See you in the dreams, Pretty Roamer.

Petty Theft with a Me in the Rigging OR Stealing as an Act of Love

This is just to say (Matt Hart) that I have stolen two of the poems from the online sampling of your issue, two of which you were probably most proud, Forgive me, (Matt Hart) they were delicious, so sweet, so cold.

Kind readers, should I suggest that besides these samples, (for I could have pillaged the night away) such names as Cindy King, Matthew Zapruder, Rebecca Louden, Kevin Oberlin, Richard Siken! and yes, I am serious: Amanda Nadelberg appear astride that gorgeous Forklift, wouldn't you just hit click and subscribe?

Goodbye, Radio Girl
for Kate Hall

Your pink sweater— how it fits. Your questions—
their wings, and their whys. All of this is remarkable
but what we remember most is the way
your eyes went there and there. Your questions
and the bees acting like ladies on lunch.
Lucky bees and your questions are numerous.
Here is an answer held to my chest.
How about all this sunshine— it makes your sweater
seem all candyish and lamby.
Eyes up here, Radio Girl.
The most memorable part was the sheer number of all of you
out there and your fluttering hands.
How many of us there are.
Next question.
Her sunglasses are a reflection of your faces
in the crowd, her highlights, yes.
Come here a moment and mind the steps up.
It's like a moving picture but everybody's smoking and nobody's eating.
Laughter, sure, but mostly in the lower registers.
Mammalian. How'd those bees find us again,
I'm sorry what did you say? The answer to that is sometimes
but I wish it was never or always when they open the snack coffin.
I've forgotten my name but I know my place.
Your earlobes, Radio Girl, they seem important.
Or is it your mouth. Your pink sweater. The way you fit here in floral.
There's a story here and I'm feeling ready to tell it.
This is the way of the tribes. Before we were here
we were elsewhere and where we are going is next,
so, Goodbye, Radio Girl! Goodbye to your holdings, our voices,
the bees and how they swarmed was the answer.

Betsy Wheeler (of course)
Forklift, Ohio (always!)

July, July
Let us hope we are succeeded
in this world by the beauty
that preceded us.
Yes, I'm staring.
Do you remember me?
I was the one looking up the tracks
for the train, or even
just the headlight of a train,
anything that might offer
another foggy promise of arrival.
From every direction, the city
filled the neighborhood
with its surgical hum.
And then evening began to unload
its freight of infinite darkness,
or whatever spell
you were under that allowed me
to first stand there and watch
you remove your clothes.
I love you so much it's dangerous.
I don't regret a thing.
There are rewards
for which there will be no accounting.
The princess blows gently
across the surface of her apricot tea.
The storm reaches the unsuspecting coast.
Finally breaking free, the pier
is swallowed into the foam.
What boiling point?
Some collisions require no cause.
I fell into the river and, lucky for me,
now you're my wife.

Dobby Gibson from Forklift, Ohio

What Wanda Wants...

Fun Gift Unit
a poem for Wanda

Something there is that is hopeful here
that moment that my friend describes as “the sure thing”
when someone’s eyes are aglitter with “tonight.”

That’s fun gift unit or the bright, buoyant whimsy
of beach balls against an infinite summer.
If the fun gift unit be a city, it be a city for lollygagging

for mayhem and merriment. The fun gift unit
is a place all shining with yeses. The brooders
pass through and the fun gift uniters find themselves

here, where the weather is a bubblemachine set to always,
and the rainfall is emitted from green and orange plastic
squirtguns. At the Fun Gift Unit Café, they serve nonstop

hot chocolate with mandatory whipped cream. Even a maraschino
cherry stopping in at the Fun Gift Unit Saloon
feels needed again where someone is always ordering a Shirley Temple.

Even anagrammed, there’s a fungi fun tit or a fig tuft I nun
I nun, you nun we all nun a fig tuft?
And who doesn’t benefit, Wanda?

Even my hopeful friend of the last stanza chimes in
Can I watch? Watch away, Friend, the fun gift unit
keeps giving and giving. Add guns and gin, tiff and guff and the fun

fun gift unit is rolling like a dunebuggy to the next sandbar of eternal frolicking.
It’s hard to frolic in a poem but not so on the fun gift unit where frolic
is the default. What’s hard to construct are phrases like fun gift unit

of our discontent, or it was the best of fun gift units the worst
of fun gift units. While ask not what your fun gift unit can do for you,
ask what you can do for your fun gift unit sounds somehow right.

Long Live Diagram

for their generous, savvy review. I always admire the reviews at Diagram and was thrilled when I found out that someone at Diagram was looking over my book in order to write one. Even so, I'm blown away by the subtelties that I only dreamed some reader would catch and Gunnar Benediktsson did. Speaking of: I looked him up this morning to find that, (like Jason Bredle, another great Diagram reviewer/poet) Mr. Benediktsson writes a careful, sonically-booming poem himself. Thank you, Gunnar, Ander, Diagram, what a nice thing to add to a Tuesday.

s

BFF BEREFT

First your father's yahrzeit candle, synagogue and then off to the airport. We are both grieving a little by now, though the origins are a generation off. It's colder already and undeserving D.C. hears the particular footfall that, recorded on my cell-phone as you call me from the wrong side of Virginia or is it Hampshire? makes your walk visible to me, clear back in Ohio. No one has your walk, Bird.

The airport, the airport, that bandit-handed place. Coffee and tea and thee and me and security--that double-edged term. So many lines. The carry-on baggage. The bottled water gone dangerous. An attempt to run it back to me and then The Man, the Long-Armed, No-Jokes Airport Man, says no way and with that, the water is forfeited and dear Bird, you are in flight and I am watching you even as the escalator lifts me up and the shuttle takes you off, and I am sad-some and suddenly thirsty.

We Feel You, Julianna

http://www.esquire.com/fiction/ESQ0207Baggott

Admittedly, dear Kathrine spotted this first, but as a way,way,way back Baggott fan, (I drove to Birmingham, AL to sit in a too-tiny audience and marvel at how gracious, how incredibly together, besides talented, besides funny, besides gorgeous, Ms. B really is) I have to post it, too.

Because no one has earned her literary keep better and if she's saying it's hard to do, (earning a living as a writer, while not collapsing from the endeavor to juggle it and you know, life) it's tougher than even all that. I don't know of a work ethic like Julianna Baggott's and I certainly don't possess one. I work in starts and stops and have more manuscripts ready to go than I ever have out in the mail.

Speaking of: for the rumor mill that has erroneously spun out the word that I have a book forthcoming from Red Hen Press--please note: you're wrong. I love the press and they were very encouraging about the story that won their recent contest and subsequentally optimistic about what the manuscript overall might look like. While I would be pleased and honored, it would be news indeed for Red Hen to hear that they're "running" my book. Next time, unless the book has an Amazon page, I won't breathe a word.

Ghost of Fashion Haunting Bookstores Soon!

I mean Lesley Jenike. I mean Word Press. A book I cannot wait to hold.

Congratulations, Fair Lesley! This is news to no one who has read you but it still makes my day.

Cincinnati Welcomes Veace

I'm off to Kent this afternoon for the world's fastest roadtrip...back tomorrow night...sigh. Then me and Veace are meeting up some time this weekend and hitting Habbie's because that's what we do.

Something About What Happens When We Talk

Cold sun here, so Tuesday. Last night of teaching the Madness & Lit. class and I'll miss it. Speaking of all-time belovely students: Kent people, write in and tell me if you can meet up at some coffee place in Kent later this week for anthology assembly or just writing-chats.

Lucinda, Lucinda, unsuffer me.

(And Tony Ro. Your comment dumped itself before I could publish it. (Technical problem at blogspot. W/B and tell me what you said.)

Sir Prize, I know that's what you are

but what am I besides happy to be home. The big party of yesterday went off without a hitch. I'm reading Stephen Dobyns and drinking decaf. and listening to Arrow Sparrow--hot new find of a musical treat.

Soon, hotemuluv.com will be live and wordsonwalls.net already is in a partial about-to-be-added-onto way. Thursday finds me in Akron and with luck, April in Kenyon and Kent. I like luck. I like it very much.

Speaking of luck or lucky error or Anthony Robinson, where were you? And Matthew Guenette? Gold star for Michael Morse for coming by (or being tracked-down) and saying hello. And Aaron Smith, finally I got to meet the dear, talented Aaron. I saw too, Simone Muench (read her poems, buy her books!) and Kristy Odelius whose poems I've long admired. Brian Ingram, my old Bama friend. Of course, Ander and John Pursley who is scooping up the literary prizes that Ander hasn't already. Best of all, I hung out with Kathrine Wright and Scarlett Rooney, both of Florida, wordsonwalls and beautiful words. It was so nice to see you all.

Plus, Jackie Osherow: poet and kickboxer extraordinaire who made me want to grow up to be just like her.

Then home again, to party in the honor of the birth of Sir Caleb the Great and Lovely.

I bought Blind Date w/ Cavafy by Steve Fellner and chapbooks by both this year's Wick Chapbook winners. I meant to buy a bunch of books from Switchback and Dancing Girl Press. I recommend Fever Pitch by Christy Bowen and the Cindy King's chapbook. Also, as an old Scott Cairn's fan, it was cool to run into him and find out that he's hanging out at the same monastery that my dad visits (Mt. Athos) and that he's written a book about it. The Amazon wishes are growing long.

HAPPY BIRDAY TO YOU!!!!!

OH Bird, you mean the world to me.
Happiest.

I Favorited You 513 Days Ago

The question has vanished, but I remember your eyes
all pupil at a distance, walnut up close.
(Malinda Markham, I think)

Congratulations Caleb

for receiving the RO1 Grant and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Who's the emu with the mostest?

Nashville is forgiven. All is forgiven. Some nights I love the airport.
Wednesday is Brazilian grill and birthday. Thursday finds me flying away.

More great books on the horizon. Paul Guest's second book not yet Amazoned but if you watch Paul's blog and you should anyway, he'll give you the heads-up.

Want these Words

How lucky to long.

Interior

want him here
want him lie down in dirt
want him dusk and drunk

blame the egg blame the fractured stones
at the bottom of the mind

blame his darkblue glare and craggy mug
the bulky king of trudge and beer stein

how I love a masculine in my parlor
his grizzly shout and weight one hundred drums

in this everywhere of blunt and soft sinking
I am the heavy hollow snared

the days are spring the days are summer
the days are nothing and not dead yet

I in my inhale my red and my coursing
I have no other life than this

Deborah LandauThe Cincinnati Review

Kudos to Kudva

Prabhakar Kudva works for a big computer company and does not, firstly, identify as A Poet or even a A Writer. He does write novels and poems and does so with more discipline than most Writers I know. That said, he doesn't send work out, like, say ever. Back in 1995 he did for a minute. And he got publications right and left. Puerto del Sol, etc.One was Cold Mountain Review. Just this week--these twelve YEARS later--they contacted him and said that from each issue they selected one poem for their anniversary issue and his poem A Dance of Uncertain Embers is that very one! In a recent email he asks: Do you think I should start sending my poems out again?

Here's your new meme, I think, friends, poets, countrycats, all....

Nashvillian Missings & A Blind Date with Some Great Verse

There's a silence here that stains even Sippy Cups, even the newly unglassed trees. There's a phone tower that isn't doing its job somewhere between here and Tennessee....

In other news: Check out the latest winner from Marsh Hawk Press. These poems are solid, sexy, and whip-smart. The book is a beauty, too. And keep an eye out for Cate Marvin's latest amazingness. Her book is available for pre-order from Amazon.

Back from the BlogBeyond!!!!

Blogger and I have had some difficulties. I have the new blog now and I can actually access it. I'm so happy to hear from my Kent State students again! I've missed you all but this blog is the main source of communication with them. (And they rock and you will know their names soon because they are so talented.)

And Alan May and Steph Rogers, good to hear from you all, too. Getting ready to Atlanta and AWP here. It should be interesting. I'm listening to new Patty Griffin and new Lucinda Williams (thank you Chris Wick.)

It's Friday and Words on Walls is in serious production. We're hoping to do a reading at AWP--a hotel and little five points thing. If you're game, give me a shout-out.

More momentarily.

Happy Belated Birthday

Keith Rehm: Who will not see this, but no matter. Never does Achtung Baby play that I don't recall long, long drives and you. Happy Birthday my old friend. I hope your these-days-world is a big, pretty birthday cake with frosting flowers.
"theLil'F"

Kristi Maxwell Meme Complete

1. I have eaten lamb brains and fish eyes, octopus, tripe (which has a lovely Greek name but which my sisters and I ignored in lieu of our super-eloquent insides in cream).

2. I once dined at a table at The Blackbird Cafe with Agha Shahid Ali, Robert Pinsky and Joseph Lease. It was there that I fell in serious crush with both Shahid and Pinsky--both even then, and for various reasons, completely unavailable to me--and, of course, that keeps the lights on at Motel Crush.

3. I am terrified of earwigs. An old Twilight Zone episode compounded this terror.

4. I have been trying to make peace with the color yellow for many years. To do so, I overcompensate.

5. I have a scar that corkscrews around my right wrist and I can always tell when people want to ask if I tried to off myself. In truth, I tore through a storm door when my cousin was about to quit playing tag with me. A jagged piece of glass zipped around and I could see my bones, plus that deeply plum-colored blood that people call blue. Speaking of scars and plums: Many years ago, I had a tumor the size of a plum removed from my ring finger. (Yes, that one.) I blame this for so much.

----------------
Besides Chicky and Wanda, I'll be not every one of these is news to Kathrine, Steph, Caleb, or Eliot. It would be cool if they were.

Face Up in the Rain

Sitting at Sippy Cups, reading Yeats, and this fabulous poem, from which I swiped a portion from Chicky's blog to capture today. What I love about my life is the coffee--Highlander Grogg and my homemade oatmeal served best (brown sugar, cinnamon and the dash of cardamom, just because) here at "Sippy's" (an endangered species of a place, watch for the campaign to save it,) listening to Edith and the regulars wonder at Richard Thompson's upcoming concert, the number 17 bus driving by and shaking the windows, the emuist (at work, playing the serious physician) but occupying space here because we work and laugh here so often, and my calender which notes Chicky Wang's serious intention for breakfast Friday and Forever21--to celebrate partial victories (because, we could be dead, after all).
And with that I deliver this passage, which yes, Chicky, reverbs all through me.

Why she doesn’t get more irritated when the computer underlines her mistakes, especially when they aren’t even mistakes, it’s just that the computer can’t understand what she wants to say or how she wants to say it. How italics sometimes communicate feeling so well. Why tone is so important, and body language, and even touching another person sometimes, and hearing that person’s voice, and using the expressive functions unique to human beings. Whether she will kiss someone again. Whether the winter will be very cold again this year, and she’ll stay inside a lot. Whether or not there will be time to say all the things she needs to say to certain people. How conscious her use is of different forms of forgetting – sleep, drink, blind love. And whether this forgetting is balanced by wanting at other times so badly not to forget.
from Emily Anglin's If Lady Caroline Lamb Were Alive Today: Things She Would Not Know

Red Rose, Proud Rose, Sad Rose of all my days!

Yeats and I danced. I stepped on his toes. Yeats and me--we're nothing if not long-suffering. Call headquarters for details.
Trying.
To bring the balloon of the mind into a shed at high wind.
*
Come near, come near, come near - Ah, leave me still
A little space for the rose-breath to fill!
*
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
*
My dear, my dear, oh dear,
It was an accident.

Wild, Wild Gratitude (with an emu or two beside.)

This goes out to you, Sir, who has never let me down--thank you.

You see, you hold me up to the light in a way.
John Ashbery

Sharky Diagrams

or Diagraming Sharks
Simone Muench, goddess of verse, has posted my poem Lathe over at Shark Forum. I mention this for the usual narcissistic reasons, of course, but also because Simone Muench writes and reads good stuff. The forum is full of good blood for the anemic poet. (Too much vampire-watching.) Anyway, get there and drink up.
Additionally, and not so gothically, but kind of, is this issue of Ander Monson's online cookie jar of a journal. I recommend anything always by Kristy Bowen but you'd do well to check out Kevin Oberlin's cool poems (and with their own gothic touch of Joss Whedon).

Picking the First Poesies

I think I loved repetition first, that you could do that miles to go before I sleep twice, like prayer, like something I didn't know you were "allowed" to do until then. That's when some doors and windows flew open in my brain. So Stopping By Woods is no news to any of you. Then I found Acquainted with the Night and loved it for its detached, textured loneliness. (One late half-inebriated night at Kent State, I watched my friend, Chris walking to David Hassler's home along really empty streets on a brisk early October night and I thought again of this poem for the way it looked like he felt: Alone but in a kind of cool bath of solitude).
Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
From "New Hampshire", 1923

And I loved Auden's villanelle even before I would encounter Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle. What can I say, echoes moved me and they still often do.

Cincinnati is a little colder, actually

Since someone took all the warm away.
At the fruitstand, someone waits for peaches and words.

The first poem that scalped me is coming soon.
Anyone out there want to leave comments on the first poem that made you want to
read/write more?

Chicky and I are posting these as close to in order as we can get the. Black Rook (see two entries ago,) was actually one of mine. But there are more.
Show me yours?

Winter well.

The Somehow of Love is Someone Remembered

Before Chicky and I begin posting the poems that made the baby-us want to write, let me quickly post this new find of mine: Michael Morse with lines like "the somehow of love" that make me feel like a baby-me all over again. Plus it's written for Larry Levis--beloved and so-missed.

On Reading
for Larry Levis
1.
When I read in bed, the book above me
held high, arm extended, I hold
the top right corner with my left hand
and let the finished pages rest on my forearm—
as if I’m denying the rays of a small sun
or keeping the printed word at bay.
It’s Chekovian, how everything descends,
the protagonists, their stars and their sun.
This morning it’s my friend; I haven’t learned
to say his name in death—what he left
was ink on a page, and I think of him
as a small tuberculin boy spitting up rubies,
as what his body couldn’t keep it expelled,
the way coal works the snow crystal-by-crystal,
the way blood slowly fills a landscape called lung,
slow and persistent like language on a page
held above the head and kept at bay.

2.
It’s Valentine’s Day and I’m reading in bed.
I’m with my lover and we’re breaking up
although neither of us knows it yet—
I am reading and she is sleeping.
The book is still above me but I’m gone
(prescience disguised in a cloak of daydream):
I’m at my lover’s apartment years later
and I’m holding her baby, not mine and yet
a ruby of my making, my ambivalence.
The somehow of love is someone remembered,
my teacher, my lover, my page of night sky
all jeweled with ancient and dimming stars.
I can read and not possess what’s done,
the so-small window of a text celestial:
morning comes all clock-tick and sparrow-chatter,
and the dawn turns to starch just waiting for ink.
The books are by the bed, and they are dead and ready.

Copyright © Michael Morse

January's Wild Light Redux

2007 came in on little cat feet. Velvety and calm. I keep thinking of Plath's Black Rook for the moments of radiance patched together during turmoil. I love this poem for its hopefulness that doesn't forget the sad or jagged.

Black Rook in Rainy Weather

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain-
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall
Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical
Yet politic, ignorant

Of whatever angel any choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur.
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance
Miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,

For that rare, random descent.

Sylvia Plath

Could James Brown and Gerald Ford Have Known?

That they'd be strolling into the next days together?
Today's poem was no great find on my part but on the part of Poetry Daily.


LULLABY

My little lack-of-light, my swaddled soul,
December baby. Hush, for it is dark,
and will grow darker still. We must embark
directly. Bring an orange as the toll
for Charon: he will be our gondolier.
Upon the shore, the season pans for light,
and solstice fish, their eyes gone milky white,
come bearing riches for the dying year:
solstitial kingdom. It is yours, the mime
of branches and the drift of snow. With shaking
hands, Persephone, the winter's wife,
will tender you a gift. Born in a time
of darkness, you will learn the trick of making.
You shall make your consolation all your life.


Amanda Jernigan
POETRY
Volume CLXXXVII, Number 3
December 2005

Happy Channukah!

A new pretty clock with numbers that hang in the air.A banner of red, glittery, light sprinkled through a dark kitchen and you Bird, you cause some eerie glowing everywhere you go.
Night Four--the middle candle of the week and a deeply-cool surprise from a favorite person. (If this were a grade-school valentine it would read: I love "keeping time" with you, Valentine!)
Efharisto, Andra.

January's Wild Light Come Early

If the wild light of this January day is true
I pledge me to be truthful unto you
whom I cannot ever stop remembering
J. Ashbery

A Keeping-Place

All this studying of poetry makes me crave a keeping-place for my favorites. This is what I do like about blogs--the keeping. Today's post is stolen from Teresa Ballard's blog and I mention that because she is my new find. Her poem in Best New Poets 2006--yum! (available now and containing also one of the most beautiful poems you'll ever read--not surprising in that it's written by Steph Rogers). If you buy this anthology and come to AWP with it, I can arrange your copy be signed by Ms. Rogers. I think Eduardo Corral is there, and Amanda Auchter, too? Just the rumor of those people should get your cursor heading over to Barnes & Noble.

Little Things

After she's gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl's breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a small
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the beautiful blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this tiny image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son's sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have -
as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

- Sharon Olds

At the Annie-Fest

Mr. Mine

Notice how he has numbered the blue veins
in my breast. Moreover there are ten freckles.
Now he goes left. Now he goes right.
He is buiding a city, a city of flesh.
He's an industrialist. He has starved in cellars
and, ladies and gentlemen, he's been broken by iron,
by the blood, by the metal, by the triumphant
iron of his mother's death. But he begins again.
Now he constructs me. He is consumed by the city.
>From the glory of words he has built me up.
>From the wonder of concrete he has molded me.
He has given me six hundred street signs.
The time I was dancing he built a museum.
He built ten blocks when I moved on the bed.
He constructed an overpass when I left.
I gave him flowers and he built an airport.
For traffic lights he handed out red and green
lollipops. Yet in my heart I am go children slow.

Anne Sexton

Let me be ten

ANGEL OF BLIZZARDS AND BLACKOUTS
Angel of blizzards and blackouts, do you know raspberries,
those rubies that sat in the gree of my grandfather's garden?
You of the snow tires, you of the sugary wings, you freeze
me out. Let me crawl through the patch. Let me be ten.
Let me pick those sweet kisses, thief that I was,
as the sea on my left slapped its applause.

Only my grandfather was allowed there. Or the maid
who came with a scullery pan to pick for breakfast.
She of the rols that floated in the air, she of the inlaid
woodwork all greasy with lemon, she of the feather and dust,
not I. Nonetheless I came sneaking across the salt lawn
in bare feet and jumping-jack pajamas in the spongy dawn.

Oh Angel of the blizzard and blackout, Madam white face,
take me back to that red mouth, that July 21st place.

Anne Sexton

A Little Fudging and Voila!

I have seen much stronger renderings of Chicky's great assignment. But since my fellow reindeer are not writing their promised poems, I feel free to improvise.
Calling the following carabou out to join me: Wanda, Steph, Kathrine, maybe Natasha? Other KSU kittycats? And you, To--you've got thirty seven sexy things to say soon. Say them this way?


Beach Balls for Termites
Let us shout to the sharp clouds
for an answer. Look to bruises
and kisses for clues. These roses
loud colors, beautiful hair,
a word from our sponsors and we’re
there in an old Ford pickup, wearing

out our welcome. In the rain,
we drive ourselves wild, in the rain,
we are copacetic, cool-red
a wavering flame as a lean-to.
We swing like a match to the lips:
smoke this already, or douse

whole cities and their choke-cherry
ways. Sometimes we glue ourselves
to televisions, thin belief,
the sweet glue we peeled back from skin
to make ghost-skin, a half-plastic palm:
lifeline, heartline a fortune snaked-out

Let me say this about that

Lesley Jenike writes lovely poems. I heart them major. And besides all of that, and her matter-of-fact live gorgeousness and great fashion sense, she is generous enough to watch out for my work and give me the heads-up that my poem (written in and of Cincinnati) appears on Verse Daily.
I dedicate today's reading to my mommy--Tall Stacks Collaborator and to Lesley J. because she is. A certain boy-wonder of verse is wound through every couplet, too. A certain wonder keeps the fireworks blooming every day.

Glorious Women Gather

Maira wears the ruffled part of December. Something peculiar this season travels
But Maira plays canasta on a floral sofa and marvels at the merry mints of days in their little tin canisters. She happens to be. She happens to be utterly alive. There is truth in every cemetery and it hangs in the trees with the hawks—big as a Labrador puppy—with eyes calmly hungry. There is truth in the burning-hot magenta, in Russian men in big, black coats and glorious women and jam—most of all jam.

Spiked & Strongly Gleaming

Poem

I am sorry not to have written you sooner.
We are peculiar forms, like someone's old papers rifled quickly through
But not read before the burning.
How to speak of the icy cave-like place I lately feel,
Its white reluctance dividing me from all things I desire and see.
I think it must often be the case
That one holds within oneself a cold guardedness, expectant, deeply quarried,
The way mistakes grow magnified inside the mind, spiked and strongly
gleaming.

How skilled, how dominant, this white unswaying place.
And I wonder how, bred from our churning, it constructs itself so strongly
Like the crush of light I sometimes at the noonhour hear.

LAURIE SHECK (from Pool's website, while you're there, the ever-great Bruce Smith is not to be missed.)

I Favorited You 433 Days Ago

For what it's worth.

We Who Move

At This Moment Of Time
Delmore Schwartz

Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear
The Ace of Spades. They fear
Love offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece,
Sweet with decision. And they distrust
The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,
Then the colored lights, rising.
Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume
Greedily Caesar at the prow returning,
Locked in the stone of his act and office.
While the brass band brightly bursts over the water
They stand in the crowd lining the shore
Aware of the water beneath Him. They know it. Their eyes
Are haunted by water

Disturb me, compel me. It is not true
That “no man is happy,” but that is not
The sense which guides you. If we are
Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream),
You are exact. You tug my sleeve
Before I speak, with a shadow’s friendship,
And I remember that we who move
Are moved by clouds that darken midnight.



(I miss you terribly)

There's nothing wrong with Ohio

Except the snow and the rain... (Bowling for Soup says)

Last night I read for my own Cincinnati peeps and it was a great reminder why I stayed here, the miraculous happenings of my book and these people who are so amazing and so kind, humble, and generous. I'm making like a tree, Dr. A. and I seem to be sapping. So anyway, my friends here--faculty and students--rocketh beyond. Thank you, all.

Small-time Rapture

An Introduction to Devotion

Do you consider yourself adept? The face of

oh my and the body of a wish: this is the error

of sadness. Now you say, don 't implicate me.

Too late, sweetness. As in the Bonnie & Clyde dream . . .

Relentlessly acquisitive. As in, get ready

for us, God. This is small-time rapture. Soothe me.

Or else, I said to no one in particular. Back off—!


Copyright © 2006 Mary Ann Samyn All rights reserved
from The Laurel Review

Happy Name Day, MamaCat

You are the great Ekaterna. Se agapo.

I feel you Ivan

A Face with a View

A Map Of Love

Your face more than others' faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to I while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.

Donald Justice

Until I Can't See You Anymore

No turkey you my
one-bird-holiday bird, you:
cornucopia.

Against Elegies

What if we let you sing first?
What if we look for you with Mallarme’s
blank stare: birds round an empty dish,

stony limbs? To tell the history of our grief
we settle for an empty doorway
and a maple leaf

or a woman with neckcurls, named Jane,
changed by her poetry teacher’s love
to a wren wound in light. Shimmering anodyne.

Elegies so resolute in wood or wings
that we forget the truer
measurements of unfinished things:

the distance between two
disappearing habits; the echo
of a promise lodged in a warbler’s throat;

the length of a dreamy boy swinging
from his favorite limb; the ragged patch
below — our ground for spotting him.

If grieving is a way of working wood,
building thresholds, wrapping birds —
then hands will keep us tending things

too near. What if this June air
should circle, not fall on, our copper chimes
with the passiveness of prayer?

What if the breeze that would carry
a bird’s perfect sorrow were to kneel
at the base of an oak, and refuse to rise?

Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved

Someone is looking you up on a map, right now

If you were music,
I would listen to you ceaselessly
And my low spirits would brighten up.

If you were a star,
I would gaze by the window till dawn,
And peace would enter my soul.

-- Anna Akhmatova, From March Elegies
Not yet Thanksgiving and cafed in cold Cincinnati across from the coffee and comet-eyed.
The last leg of exam days and no turkey and no peace until they're over. Philadelphia is all kinds of perfect bird (Yia Sou Andras) or will be soon. I am neck-deep in Akhmatova, Stephen Spender and there are worse ways to go. Somewhere and someday: a stone house, light pouring across the kitchen, the certain mornings of tea kettle's whistling and the rustle of still-chilly newsprint. I won't take any of it for granted.

Sanguine Hummingbirds, All Manner Pretty Words by Kristy Bowen

& care of Simone Muench, author of The Air Lost in Breathing and Lampblack and Ash--two of the most beautiful books of poetry you'll ever lick off the page.
Speaking of licking, I give you
sangria

Not red, not exactly. More like dawn,
or the illusion of it. Hummingbirds, humidity.

Azaleas splitting in your palm. In Texas,

the nights sueded, starlit.
There is no language for the soft
of your hands, their thunderous Braille.
Bruises ripen on my wrists like plums.

Nevertheless, I am sly, scarlet-lipped.
Gathering light in the folds
of my dress. Crossing my sevens
polite and girlish. I still dream

of the desert, the woman you once kept
sleeping in the curve of your body.
She slices peaches, pulls the hair from her face.

She sweetened and full of rain.
Even the coyotes have lost the scent of her.

News to Dance To: The Book of Abe & Caleb's Whereabouts

Word has it that beloved Abraham Smith has a book forthcoming from Action Books.
More information as I get it.

And here is the promised shout-out to Caleb Adler. This shout-out appears as a reward to Caleb Adler for being near enough to shout at. "Hallelujah!"


DEAR WEIRDO
my dream involves
clay balls placed
at serious intervals
on the woods and
hay mow floor
warm flour hair
love may I
make a bread
of how you run
real birds
soothed in
the soft rock
of your pocket cloth

Abraham Smith (of course!)
from The Diagram

Bird, Bird, I Cannot Get You Close Enough

Ah, Millay... & ah, Ellen Gilchrist for Anna Hand: "I cannot get you close enough I said to him, pitiful as a child. And never can and never will..." and so on.
And ah, to the emuists with their tiny beds and the girls that do not forget them but sleep in the groove of their forms for years after that bird/bed have fled. Anna gets it: why the best girls will curl around the emuist and the memory of the emuist in a bed too tiny for most but a baby bear bed to the right girl. Anna & Edna & me agree: have heart, Sweet-Tart, your Goldilocks is out there.

Every Pencil in Pennsylvania Writes

you a limerick, Bird. Sir Gallivant, your pretty plummage stole the color from Ludlow Avenue and left it just low and anemic besides. This better be worth some cheese steak, some duck (in torn fishnet thigh-highs with a hot-blue garter) an electric storm, a smoked whitefish for two but just you, Bird, can consume it as if it's the end of the world and we're waiting for the spaceship--our fifty pounds of goods--and at l/e/ast in my good dream of your nightmare--a still-shared planet. Ava agrees with me: "It's been nice, Dwight Lionel. It's been everything. ..." Go ahead then: be Philadelphia's rare bird for a day or two.
Catch of the day:

“Prison Song”
My heart is like a prison filled
with zebras, songbirds, white mice,
black gypsies, tandem bicycles,
symphonies, ballerinas, movie stars,
and the world’s largest ball
of red ribbon.

Oh, My Dear, if only you
could find the key.
from Jukebox Gothic
Alan May (author of the you-need-to-buy-it-now-it's-gorgeous! Apocryphal Text)

Tonight I hear the gone in Oregon

or a gun, a loaded, heavy thing. It's cold. Grey. Drizzly. And there should be some tea steeped in terra cotta. This is no night for the warm red clay. The sky's at it again: stony looks and where's the thunder, anyway? Whatever put the no in November, take this dose of Jeni Olin's poems which are sizzling yeses.
Vanishing Point
Depressed like cabin air & passing out
peach-tinted hygiene manuals
on westside highway I lead men on
like the Virgil of the garment district:

Now this lovely structure on your right
is baby’s jeans & a struggling pyramid of girls & oh
well I understand his orphans with my gun like cinema verité

shot through with lower-functioning inmates –
with the “inkings of Scandinavian malaise” & whatnot
I go see art & feel priceless but to be a good sport you have to lose
& lose value like junk bonds he likes to “sit back & watch ‘em grow . . .”

The Met stuffed with alabaster tits I left alone, sexy & mightily unDutch

Mastered, set fire to a batik picture
of Mother Chelsea the Pitiless who wasn’t sickle-
cell white & incontinent & Dia-funded

I stood in his cloud shirt by myself

cursed to stalk the night through all eternity & original so on
through the small ballet company of stocking runs & upset

nuns down Sixth Avenue, John Wieners,
the Americas breaking apart so I can feel this sinuous & partial wind
like lyme disease with a drip in the arm & the sky is falling.

Guerilla Poetics

The very cool and talented Justin C. has brought to my attention: Guerilla Poetics. Check it out. I love the premise of it.

A Poem I Had Forgotten I Loved So Much

Gary Short's Gathering

Parfait

To quote Maggie Anderson regarding the evening with Eleanor Wilner here at KSU, "it was incandescent." And it was.

Regarding the week, the people I've met and every minute I've been here, I could gush on and on, but I'll spare you. I will say that last night, the Venice Bar some Eliot Ness beer, and Eleanor--stunning in her black poncho and so funny and wise--made for one of the best nights of my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Wick family with the anything-but-ordinary Chris as representative, and David Hassler, the newly-awarded Ohio Poet of the Year, and Maggie Anderson: gracious,sharp with "quiet authority." Of course, you Eliot Wilson, generous, appreciated, knowing you only gets better. And to my students here--you were icing to the sweetest "birthday cake" of a week. Here are the links I promised you. (You are already missed--stay in touch.)
(Google searches should get you there until I have time to plug in links)
Born Magazine
The Diagram
Wave Books
Death Villanelle
New Pages Lit. Links
Poetry Machine
Also, for a great sample cover letter check out Pebble Lake Review's advice in the submissions section.

For a great sense of the terms and forms of poetry, check out John Drury's Poetry Dictionary.

A feather in the hand is better than a bird in the air.

I'd steal a fortune for you Bird.

I want candy

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A CANDYFREAK

"A lot of this is really about how frightened we are, as a culture, of pleasure. We always have to make it something dirty and hidden. So one agenda of the book, in that sense, is to allow other freaks out of the closet."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interview with Steve Almond by Amy Cox Williams

What did I know, what did I know?

Oh how I love Those Winter Sundays. Today is cold and colder still on account of Austin, Texas.

My dear Floridian friend sent me a delicious package of reading: Julianna Baggott & Steve Almond's collaborative novel Which Brings Me to You is pretty & steamy. And Kathrine Wright's winning story in Paper Journey's newest anthology: Blink is worth the whole price of admission. (Lots of other good stuff too including Words on Walls' own Abbe and Tiffany.) Read them.

While I'm at it, let me direct you to anything by Ander Monson. Ander Monson has a brain that's like a rollercoaster all threaded with dollheads and daisies plus some major electricities various. I mean, really, where else can you go for that? Expect some links soon.

Some Thunderless Thursday

Motion/Silence

What storm, a severed house
with its matched pleats, scattered

breaths of lightning, broken thirds?
What children, double-helix

of limbs, that precision of sleep?
For there is no love

but this: your face, our room
with its parted legs. A darkened city

with papery rain and drawn dusk.
What vagueness, all your force,

but what could we mend
with clarity? You know a body

will move against resistance.
And for this, I have made

our bed. The lamp
has burned intention to a slip.

Come to your place. What solace
is there to outlast this?

I have already left you
as much as I can.

Wendy Scofield
(but I wish it were mine.)

Expect Such Breathlessness

The Nearest Simile Is Respiration
To poetry

I was boozed I was doped I was maybe
a floozy before you knew me, loose
leafed like autumn and most of the books
of the Old Testament that fell out
of my father's Bible. I had a body.

I had a habit of hauling my telescope
into the outskirts, ransacking all
the toothsome blackness for what: a reason
not to do me in. Proof I was more
than the seasonal ragbag detritus
choking the rooftop gutters, more
than a piece of the cosmic dust
in some ruined philosophy.

I could not be consoled by the universal
Sisyphus in us all, the dung beetle
nuzzling its putrid globe.

I could not hitch my wagon. The stars
and stars abrade my notions of my Self;
tricuspid Eros chewed me raw; Jesus
Christ rubbed mud in my eyes, and I saw
not. I did not see.

But with you! my sweetheart hairshirt,
my syntactic gondolier, ruffian for hire, befoolable
irresolute Chanticleer: with you, I back-float
the massy and heretofore unnavigable childhood
algal blooms, where no fish swam. No fish
have swum that Mississippi.

With you, I forgive my father's notes
to NASA, the self-inflicted swastika tattoo,
my sister's coked-up juggernaut cannonball
into the afterlife.

I forgive the afterlife,
resurrect John Lennon and the jukebox
at the Quik 'N' Hot, infect myself
with a rare strain of tarantism. With you, I dance
the summum bonum. With you, I am greater
than or equal to the lack, and luck is weather
that permits my red begonias.

Ashley Capps
Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields
The University of Akron

(I just bought this book and it waits like a pastry for me to be allowed to read anything not on my exams list. You have no excuse not to indulge.)

Light Coming Through the Shape of a Moon

and the man etched upon it, with a book of poems beside
and not one dead letter among them, these are live-wires
and lit-bird these are Alan Mays and loaded weapons

Go here to buy some